Top 10 facts about Dunkirk you should know!

Recently watched Dunkirk? Discover more about the film with our top ten Dunkirk facts that you should know.

1 – The title “Dunkirk” is divided into three segmented colours: sky blue, dark blue, and white, referring to the three parts of the plot: air, sea, and land. The director, Christopher Nolan weaves the three parts in his trademark ‘snowball effect’. According to him, by applying this effect, he stripped the film of conventional theatrics and made the film to be more than the sum of its parts.

2 – Several veteran Dunkirk survivors, who were in their mid-nineties, attended the premiere in London. When asked about the film, some said that it accurately captured the event but that the soundtrack was louder than the actual bombardment, a comment that greatly amused the director.

3 – Richard Attenborough, starred in a previous film version of this historical event nearly 60 years before his grandson Will Attenborough starred in the 2017 version.

4 – After first-hand accounts of the Dunkirk evacuation revealed to Chistopher Nolan how young and inexperienced the soldiers were, he decided to cast young and inexperienced actors. When asked why he cast Harry Styles in the film, Nolan said he hadn’t realised just how famous he was and that “He fit the part wonderfully and truly earned a seat at the table”.

5 – Christopher Nolan, along with his wife and a friend, made the crossing from England to Dunkirk on a boat, the way the civilians would have done during the Dunkirk Evacuation. Nolan said it took nineteen hours because of the conditions of the sea.

6 – For the creation of this film, director Christopher Nolan focused on the “realism” of every aspect, such as putting an IMAX camera on the cockpit and wings of a fully functional Spitfire plane and make cameramen actually float in the water with the actors.

7 – The ticking sounds that serve as a crucial theme on the film’s score were recorded by composer Hans Zimmer from one of director’s own pocket watches. He then put the sounds into synthesizers and altered them in different ways for the soundtrack.

8 – The film uses a huge number of cardboard cut outs of soldiers along with 1000 extras in order to create the illusion of a huge number of men during the evacuation. The creators wanted to avoid the use of too many digital effects.

9 – The movie uses over fifty boats on the sea, the most ever put on film. 12 of them are the original ships that participated in the Dunkirk evacuation appear in the film.

10 – Dunkirk is the seventh film collaboration between Christopher Nolan and Michael Caine after Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Interstellar (2014). Caine appears in an uncredited voice cameo in Dunkirk (he’s the voice on the radio talking to a Royal Air Force officer early in the film). When asked about the cameo Nolan said, “I wanted very much to squeeze him in here. It’s a bit of a nod to his character in Battle of Britain. And also, it’s Michael. He has to be in all my films, after all.”